Action Versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters

By Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then there’s Walt Whitman, in 1856: “Whoever you are, come forth! Or man or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house.”
 
It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact, or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives? 
 
With Action versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very opposition. The active and the contemplative can—and should—be vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich, lively texture of interplay and reference.
 
This is not a self-help book. It won’t give you instructions on how to live your life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer: both.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226032375

Book preview

Action versus Contemplation

Action versus Contemplation

Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters

Jennifer Summit & Blakey Vermeule

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press,

1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03223-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03237-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226032375.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Summit, Jennifer, author. | Vermeule, Blakey, author.

Title: Action versus contemplation : why an ancient debate still matters / Jennifer Summit, Blakey Vermeule.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017042173 | ISBN 9780226032238 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226032375 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Life. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Ideals (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC BD435 .S798 2018 | DDC 128/.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042173

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1  From Action and Contemplation to Stress and Relaxation

2  The Action Bias and the Human Condition

3  Science and Humanities

4  Work and Leisure

5  Public and Private

6  A Life of Meaning in a Market World

Conclusion: The University and the World

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Once upon a time there were some ants. They gathered food all summer and laid up stores for the winter. The ants were small, but they worked together so that everyone would have enough for the long season ahead. Meanwhile, their neighbor, the grasshopper, spent the summer hopping in the sun. Winter is coming, they warned him. You’d better prepare! The grasshopper just laughed: I live in the moment. You should stop to enjoy life, too, rather than wasting it in mindless work! But the ants just worked harder. When winter came, the ants settled in with their supplies, and the grasshopper had nothing. Hungry and cold, he turned to his neighbors for help. But they had only enough for themselves and nothing to spare. In the summer it looked like we were wasting our lives, the ants told him. Now you know that we were saving them.

• • •

Once upon a time, there were some ants, who spent the fine summer of their short and precious lives toiling in Pharaoh’s army, marching robotically to the monotonous beat of the same tinny drum. Unable to think for themselves, much less to suck the marrow out of life, they worshipped such dreary, neoliberal quasi-virtues as efficiency, outcomes, and the corporate ethos. They hired consultants and put stopwatches on the shop floor. The grasshopper was appalled. Nobody in ant-world ever seemed to have a free moment to think or reflect, much less to play or enjoy. Efficient they might be, but they were hardly creative and far from happy. As for laying up stores for the winter, surely, thought the grasshopper, it is better to be happy now and play catch-as-catch-can later.

• • •

Some stories work their way into the collective consciousness and never really leave. The ant and the grasshopper come to us from antiquity.¹ Yet they are hardly just characters in an agrarian tale about the need to be prudent during times of feast in anticipation of coming famine, a story that would have made much more sense to our chronically hungry ancestors than to our overfed selves. Rather, they represent, in the words of William Blake, two contrary states of the soul. The ant and the grasshopper personify traits possessed by all people: the urge to step back, to consider our shortness of life and smallness in the cosmos, to experience life rather than waste it, versus the need to act in service of a greater good, to contribute to something bigger than ourselves, to help others endure the struggles we all share. Most of us experience both impulses regularly—sometimes in conflict, sometimes intertwined.

Yet the story as it has come down to us has a harsh moral: live like an ant or die like a grasshopper. Work for the future or find yourself in a desperate pass. The choice is starkly clear. In our lived experience, by contrast, it is downright murky. We aspire—not often successfully—to finding grasshopper-like enjoyment and fulfillment in our daily work. And even the most ant-like among us can’t easily square the ants’ virtuous work ethic with their lack of charity. Yet as children, we learn to see work and pleasure through the divisive lens of either/or.

The story of the ant and the grasshopper has woven itself tightly into the fabric of the modern mind. Around this fable cluster many of our culture’s most pressing myths, conversations, and collective freak-outs. (Remember the tiger mother and the howling that went up when she claimed that Asian children are more successful than other children because non-Asian, and especially white, parents indulge their children rather than teaching them discipline?)² The fable concerns itself, rather primally, with character development, which is central to child rearing—two areas flooded by rivers of advice, much of it quite harsh and moralizing and scary. We do not offer much advice in this book. Rather we offer a larger intellectual context for the ant and the grasshopper, and the issues that fable brings to life. This context is the ancient debate between the active life and the contemplative life.

For four years, we taught a freshman lecture course at Stanford University called A Life of Action or a Life of Contemplation: Debates in Western Literature and Philosophy. The syllabus evolved with the course, but a core set of questions remained constant: Which is more valuable, knowledge or action? Which is the greater achievement, wisdom or material success? What is best, a life of active accomplishment or a life of spiritual or intellectual contemplation? Are action and contemplation necessarily at odds, or can we hope to achieve a balance between them?

These questions concern the essence of a life well lived, a subject our students were eager to debate. But the point of our course, and now of this book, is also to show that the debate over the relative value of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, tenaciously waged since ancient times, has a fresh urgency in the twenty-first century. The central terms of this opposition—action versus thought, skill versus knowledge, worldly engagement versus otherworldly reflection—have persisted across time even as their forms and implications have changed. The classical, medieval, and early modern periods shaped the debate’s foundational questions: What is the measure of a life well lived, our acts or our strength of spirit? Are we more likely to find wisdom in solitude or in the company of others? How do we balance the demands of charity with those of religious or philosophical reflection? Modernity viewed these questions through the lens of Cartesian dualism, with its opposition of the material body to the immaterial mind, and adapted them to the challenging realities of the industrial and post-industrial eras, whose values are so conspicuously material. Even in this context, the opposition of active and contemplative lives, instead of producing resolution, generates more questions: Who are we, beyond what we make and what we do? What is the use of thought, knowledge, and truth in an age that measures value in terms of productivity? What forms of intelligence does capitalist modernity reward, and why? How else might we define our life’s value?

These questions have been debated and refined in the works of the world’s great thinkers: Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Thoreau, George Eliot and Hannah Arendt. But they are also intimately, uncomfortably familiar to our students as they choose courses, declare fields of study, and attempt to chart their own paths. We hoped that our course would help them to perceive and explore the philosophical roots of practical questions they confront every day: Should you pick your major based on your interests or on its potential financial return? When is it better to socialize than to study? Should you get a job after graduation or stay in school for another degree? What is college for, anyway? If, as many writers have argued, the Anglo-American university has become an adjunct of the labor market, and thus of private corporations, self-examination will increasingly have to do with the question of how to fashion a self in a market-dominated world.³

Many students have told us that the course helped them reflect on, and even break from, the pre-professional culture and anxious résumé building that has become so widespread on American campuses since 2008. Some told us that the course had challenged them to think in new ways about their studies, their professional plans, and what mattered most to them. Yet other students had trouble seeing how the course was relevant: the debate between action and contemplation seemed out of date—antique, as one of them wrote—not in sync with their experience of trying to stay on track. Each of these responses told us that the course had hit a nerve, that it identified a problem that remained as alive to our students as it was to the authors and thinkers we studied, men and women who negotiated the conflicting calls of utility and meaning, productivity and purpose, as living challenges.

And our students weren’t the only ones feeling this tension: we found ourselves being asked about the action/contemplation debate, on and off campus, by friends, colleagues, alumni, and family—people who felt that it described acute conflicts in their own lives. We experienced such tensions ourselves. When we first taught the course, we were two newly tenured literature professors at a research university with plentiful resources—a position about as close to the contemplative vocation as modernity allows. Yet along with the freedom to contemplate, the security of tenure brought a sense of responsibility to act, to confront questions that had become increasingly uncomfortable for both of us. We saw fewer and fewer students choosing to major in English and the other humanities, and wondered how we could articulate the value of these seemingly impractical fields—or if we should, given the insecure workplace our graduates faced. We saw our own PhD students failing to find tenure-track jobs, and questioned how, or whether, the academic humanities could adapt to the changing landscape of American higher education. We took a hard look at our own careers and the values that drove them. As educators, we urged our students to live lives of meaning and value, but could we be certain that we were attaining that goal? Given the insecurity of the post-2008 world and the inequities it produced and exposed—and our shared commitment to higher education as a force for social good and transformation—were we making the most of our positions to advance the shape and cause of knowledge in a distracted and unjust world, or were we enjoying a luxurious shelter from a world we could not change or understand?

Spending years with Plato, Shakespeare, and George Eliot in the company of hundreds of bright young people can lead to hard questions like these—questions of more than academic interest. As our encounter with these questions deepened—and with it, our appreciation of the richness of the active life/contemplative life debate—we answered them in different ways, in our lectures and in our lives. We found ourselves drawn to a wider range of sources—not just the literary classics in which we had both been trained, but research on the brain and behavior that illuminated the question from other fields, as well as film, social history, and current events that demonstrated its pervasiveness. And we made choices that changed the course of our own professional and personal lives. One of us, whose scholarly work had engaged the pragmatist tradition, was deeply drawn to contemplation as a practice and a challenge to modern values. The other, who had long studied the contemplative tradition as a scholar, was so drawn to the human connection and contribution of the active life that she left Stanford to become an administrator at a large, public university, San Francisco State. Convinced, in the end, that this question is too vital to be confined to the archives or the classroom, we decided to write this book.

This topic has no ending, no fixed point on which to rest. The debate between the active and the contemplative life runs through the history of Western philosophy and literature like a river, ever present and ever changing. Probably the most striking thing about the debate is that it should never have started. Aristotle should have ended it before it began. At the mouth of this long river stands a boulder, massive, imposing, and made of the hardest adamantine: Aristotle’s defense of contemplation in the Nicomachean Ethics. Artistotle says directly and clearly that contemplation (the Greek word is theoria) is the highest state of human flourishing (eudaimonea). Contemplation is the highest human good because it is self-sufficient, continuous (we are more capable of continuous study than of any other sort of activity), and complete on its own: unlike most actions we undertake, contemplation aims at no end beyond itself.⁴ We do it for its own sake.⁵ Therefore it is the most perfect of the virtues and the most conducive to happiness.

Yet Aristotle also differentiates fulfilled happiness (eudaimonia) from virtue (aretê), doing the right thing, which proceeds from actions and behaviors. And he concedes that knowing the good (the aim of the philosopher) and doing the good (the aim of the citizen) are not always necessarily aligned.⁶ Indeed, the distance between knowing and doing, philosophy and citizenship, would trouble Aristotle’s followers for generations and drive a wedge between the active life and the contemplative life.

Many generations after Aristotle, the choice of the contemplative life over the active life needed active defending. When John Milton, the seventeenth-century English poet, was in his early twenties, he wrote two poems, L’Allegro (the happy man, the active type) and Il Penseroso (the thoughtful man, the contemplative type). At least on the surface, the happy man seems to have much the better lot in life. He plans to dance and drink and carouse and have a carefree time with mirth and youthful jollity. The thoughtful man, by contrast, grinds away in a state of morally strenuous solitude, his surroundings dark and gloomy. Although drawn to the busie humm of men like the social partisan of the active life, L’Allegro looks like the grasshopper, given over to a life of unreproved pleasures free. In contrast, Il Penseroso, who shuns human activity and the noise of folly, looks more like the pleasure-spurning ants; yet he proclaims himself to be a follower of the Cherub Contemplation.⁷ Clearly for Milton, the rigorous vita contemplativa is the harder path to follow; the vita activa, the easier and alluring one.

But there is an autobiographical twist. When Milton wrote these poems, he was about to embark upon nearly a decade of studious retirement in the countryside. He wanted to pursue what he felt was his calling to become a poet—ultimately, the greatest epic poet in the English language. His intense ambition put him at odds with the friends he had known in college, and he was defensive about his choice of life.⁸ This may help explain why, in these paired poems, Milton tips the scales in favor of the contemplative life.

Milton may have had in mind an imaginary interlocutor such as Socrates debates in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. There, a strong antagonist named Callicles speaks passionately, arrogantly, and decisively about the benefits of the active over the contemplative life. Philosophical contemplation, Callicles argues, is a suitable pastime for young adults to help cultivate and polish them, but it is hardly a respectable choice of life for adults: When I see an older man still engaging in philosophy and not giving it up, I think such a man by this time needs a flogging. For, as I was just now saying, it’s typical that such a man, even if he’s naturally very well favored, becomes unmanly and avoids the centers of his city and the marketplaces . . . and, instead, lives the rest of his life in hiding. Socrates replies, I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good man, and when I die, to die like that. And I call on all other people as well, as far as I can . . . to this way of life.⁹

The young Milton did not have a Socrates to defend him; nor does he defend his manliness with Socrates’s vigor. Instead, he defends his choice of contemplation over action by insisting that his avoidance of pleasurable activity and dedication to rigorous contemplation will pay off far in the future, in something like prophetic strain.¹⁰ At the end of his career, he returns to this prophecy and judges it fulfilled. In so doing, he reasserts the value of inactivity as the greater virtue: They also serve who only stand and wait.¹¹ Yet Milton’s defensiveness remains palpable in that self-justifying also. Contemplation and inactivity could find value only as an alternate form of rigorous work, just as waiting, if it could be counted as a virtue, had to look like work, not philosophical reflection.

In contemporary American life, delayed gratification has come to count as what we call character. In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel began to perform an ingenious experiment that has had a long and highly moralized afterlife. He offered four-year-olds a choice: if they could wait until he came back into the room, they could have two marshmallows; if they couldn’t wait, they could ring a bell and he would give them one. He then timed them to see how long they could wait to ring the bell.¹² Fifteen years later, he sent a questionnaire to the children’s parents asking them a range of questions about their children’s aptitudes and activities. The results were striking:

The lengths of time the 4 year olds were able to delay [ringing the bell] were clearly linked to indexes of their cognitive competence as adolescents and young adults. For example, seconds of preschool delay time significantly predicted verbal and quantitative scores on the SAT administered in adolescence. It also correlated significantly with parental ratings of competencies, including ability to use and respond to reason, planfulness, ability to handle stress, ability to delay gratification, self-control in frustration situations, and ability to concentrate without becoming distracted.¹³

In other words, by the age of four, the extent to which people can exercise self-control in the face of obvious temptation predicts much of their future success in life, including whether they will be admitted to a good college. It looks as though character (or brain development) is destiny.

Delayed gratification defines a peculiarly American virtue, which is bound up with the relative values of the active life and the contemplative life. The Protestant work ethic came to associate work with virtue and leisured contemplation with dissolute vice. Unsurprisingly, The Grasshopper and the Ants would become a staple in early American primers, which taught the young how to read and write while delivering edifying lessons like that of the indignant ants: We cannot help those who do not help themselves. Mischel’s young subjects display the same virtue through similar feats of self-discipline. Eat the marshmallow now, lose two marshmallows later. Whether their choices reflect rote learning or genetic good fortune, they are worthy inheritors of the ants.

Milton was writing on the cusp of a sea change in sensibilities. His poems took the form of a debate because that was standard practice for the school exercises of his day, but they nonetheless capture an emerging, indeed modern, sensibility.¹⁴ Ancient writers saw action and contemplation as reciprocal and complementary. They asked how people could fashion a life rich in both worldly engagement